Paper short abstract:

Post-growth thinking can help reshape knowledge infrastructures (KIs). eBird, a citizen science project, embodies dynamics typical of contemporary KIs, including their material and social relations. Yet eBird also contains other tendencies that are fruitful starting points to foster other values.

Paper long abstract:

Post-growth thinking can help reshape knowledge infrastructures (KIs), as demonstrated in this analysis of eBird, the largest ‘citizen science’ project in the world. The starting point is what we learn if we look at knowledge infrastructures through their material dimension. This is especially important because while KIs share many features with infrastructures tout court, the informational turn in science (Beaulieu 2004; Wouters et al. 2013) and datafication (Beaulieu and Leonelli 2021) have inscribed KI firmly in the imaginary of the virtual, in opposition to the material. This erasure partly explains why we are so shocked by the realisations of the impact of consumption and pollution that the digital produces (Miedema and et al 2023).

Using eBird as a case, the presentations sets out how knowledge infrastructures have a material impact that varies from non-negligible to very substantial, depending on their design and on how we draw their boundaries. While current KIs, like eBird, extend the framing of nature in terms of resource availability for extraction or conservation (Turnhout et al 2014), the presentation explores how aspects already present in eBird can be expanded and consolidated to enable a focus on meaning in relation to measurements of objects, on topologies rather than location, on networks rather than individual participants (Turnhout et al 2015) and on possibility and potential, rather than calculation and probability. The need to reconfiguring KIs to suit different relations between past and future in the face of increasing uncertainty and systemic shifts is also noted.